The Sin of Education
I sat in my purple robe on a folding chair placed in the middle of the gymnasium, among the graduating class of 1991.
Stephanie Mendoza - twelve thousand dollars!
The school principal announced her sum total of scholarships and the crowd cheered and clapped as if Stephanie had performed a miracle. She’d worked hard for her miracle. She spent her entire senior year of high school applying for scholarships. I didn’t exactly understand what that meant, except that most of my friends and classmates were consumed with writing essays, approaching businesses, and polishing their shiny grade point averages before scholarship committees to compete with their peers to snatch cash prizes.
I was sure glad I didn’t have to do that! I spent my Senior year smugly pleased that this was the last I’d see of school. Ever. I knew exactly what I would be doing after high school. And lucky me, it didn’t involve waiting by the mailbox for acceptance letters or groveling for money. I was headed straight to our church’s discipleship program. I was going to serve the Lord through creative arts ministry and I didn’t need a university diploma to do it. Thank God!
Our pastor regularly preached it from the pulpit. The world’s system is broken, and we were called to be world-changers. God was raising a generation of young people who would serve the Kingdom and a piece of paper from a secular institution was useless to Him. It never occurred to me that I would do or be anything else.
My church was in a rural town of five thousand. When I graduated from the discipleship program, I was 20 and needed a job. My options were teacher, secretary, store clerk, factory or agricultural worker. To be a teacher meant going away for schooling, which wasn’t in the scope of encouraged options for young people raised to serve the Lord. I wasn’t keen to work in field or factory. The job I needed must first and foremost allow flexibility to attend church meetings, outings, functions, and ministry opportunities. I only really needed a job so I could pay rent, buy food, and maybe save for the all-important goal of setting up house as an eventual newlywed. What I did for gainful employment was of little relevance except to facilitate God’s work and my sustenance.
By the time I reached my mid-late twenties, I was circling low-pay, no-future jobs and starting to understand the great failure that was my lack of education. Serving my pastor’s vision was building inside of me an intense and deep discontent. Church leadership was happy having me working the vision of God. But I wasn’t. The longer I stagnated in my small town, the more frustrated I became.
Here's something I'll admit. I never knew what I'd go to school for in the first place. The education-sterile Petri dish I was raised in maybe had something to do with that. A motivational vacuum. For a brief moment, I did think that I wanted to become a physical therapist. Since I missed the pro-dancer show, my ticket to that world could be in the form of therapy. I'd daydream about traveling with a ballet company and taking care of their performers, giving massages, and administering healing to injured dancers. I snapped out of that dream when I learned the occupation required math and difficult science classes. And again, who was I kidding, there was the minor issue that earning a degree would require leaving home. It wasn't even really a matter of permission. It was simply a question of God's will or my will.
Jeez, I've wasted a lot of time. What am I going to do?
Every once in a while I'd get super panicky but then think, it's ok, I just need to get centered. Whenever I felt just a little off, or discontent I'd schedule an accountability session with leadership, usually the youth pastor, and pray and listen for the voice of the Lord up until the meeting. I'd explain again to the youth pastor how I just didn't feel content with where I was in life. She encouraged me about trusting the Lord and staying in the center of his will and the palm of His hand. I experienced spikes in anxiety whenever I'd return from a trip abroad, or just anywhere outside our town. I'd be home for a while, then itch to go out and experience more. To know more. I'd have an internal freak-out and repeat the prayer/accountability cycle. I was incapable of making decisions on my own for fear of doing something that met with disapproval from leadership. If I was going to do anything outside of what was expected of me, then there needed to be a revelation on somebody's part, accompanied by a prophecy to make it legit, and confirmations in many forms. At this point in my life, I was emotionally crippled and intellectually stifled. My psychological well-being was headed for a crash when finally something astonishing happened. For the first time, I glimpsed on the possibility of life options.
Are you there God? It's me, Rachel
Aunty M was paying a visit to our family and I was living with my parents. Again. Midway into her visit, she asked me outside for a chat on the porch. I was curious, did she want me to go on another trip with them? Because hell to the yes! Otherwise, I couldn't think of what specific thing she'd want to discuss outside the presence of everyone else.
Rachel, I'd really like to see you go to school and get your Bachelor's degree.
Her voice was low and assertive. I wondered if she had run this by my parents yet. It felt clandestine.
I quietly listened to what she had to say, about me being young and bright and I needed to get on the ball about doing something with my life. She said she couldn't see me spending the rest of my life in our small town (well that was offensive. God loved this town. He had plans for it.) I liked what she was saying but I couldn't wrap my head around it. The ticker tape in my mind said I'm glad you think that, but there's nothing I can do about it. Repeat. I can't do that. I'm not allowed. Repeat. In fact, I didn't actually appreciate her assumption that I even had power over such a thing. She didn't understand how many levels of permission this would require.
I will help you pay for it.
She said. That stopped the ticker tape for a split second. At least it addressed one of the more straight-forward obstacles.
It was a scandalous proposal. It excited me and shot streaks of hot fear through me all at the same time. I wondered if she'd already spoken to my parents about this, or if she was trying to win me over to the idea first so that I would announce to my parents what I was going to do with my life.
Where Aunty M was concerned, I thinly veiled my uncompromising commitment to God and my Church. I tried to appear as "normal" as possible with her. While I thanked her for her generous offer, because truly, it overwhelmed me, I had a sad and sinking feeling inside me that I'd have to reject it.
School or God, school or God?
My aunt’s proposal for a very common practice threw my world into tumult. I was risking anarchy. If my parents, but more importantly, my church leaders were not favorable to this idea, I would be faced with either being cut off from them or continuing my inopportune life in good Christian service. I didn’t know how to live life on the outside edge of my church community. It was my infrastructure and the very fabric of who I was.
I was no one without my church.
I'd seen enough people cut off or sent away for being outside the will of God.
That was not a place to be.
It was death.
All I could do was pray.
Dear Lord, I don't understand where you are leading me. Is it possible to remain in your will and follow my dreams at the same time? Please show me the way.
Sure enough, the Lord heard my prayer. He sent me a dream. The dream unsettled me but offered a glimmer of hope. A potential change in my situation. It wasn't the first time I had dreams or visions relevant to my life. I felt burdened and heavy with it. I shared it with my dad before making an appointment with my Pastors. It was always important to run these things through several channels. It was the only way to be reassured that I was hearing clearly from God, and for leadership to know I was not acting on my own accord, outside God's will. I explained to my dad that I was on a boat, being carried away from our Pastors as they got smaller in the distance and I waved goodbye. It was sad. I couldn't imagine myself breaking from them and I didn't know if this was positive or negative. My dad seemed to receive the vision with the same gravity I did. I asked him to pray for me and I made an appointment with my Pastors.
Our small town just got a McDonald's. It was a sign that God was lifting the oppression from our town. I met there for a soda with my pastors and sat at a table opposite the two of them. My heart raced and I kept asking myself if I had that dream, and if it was important enough to occupy their time in this meeting, and if I was truly ready to do what I was about to do. I described the dream with an apologetic tone while trying to reassure them that I didn't want to leave them, but wasn't sure what the dream meant. Thankfully, God worked all things together for the good. I didn’t have to leave them after all because I was able to remain in my home church and attend the local community college just a 30 minutes drive away. That solved the first two years of school, anyway. I just had to work in denial about what might happen with the second two years that required going away to a four-year school. One step at a time.
Through my young adult years, I kept a tenuous grip on staying inside the will of God as I bumbled around from activity to activity, doing my best to learn about the world, keep life exciting, AND appear to be doing it all in the name of Jesus. Today, whenever I have to give the Safe For All Audiences elevator version of why I didn't go to school until I was 30, I simply cue up Rent's La Vie Boheme, omit the sour grapes of religious zealotry and say something cool like "Oh, I spent my 20's traveling and doing dance and theatre. When I felt ready to study, I went to school to get a French degree." It sounds like I chose a life of adventure and art, in defiance of social construct.
So how did I achieve that four-year degree? Well, God was always faithful to provide. I didn’t have to leave my church. Only my small town. Our church’s flagship congregation where I attended the one-year discipleship program was in a larger college town. One of those colleges was fortunately for me, a private Christian one. I’d be taken care of by the top leadership of our church, and be attending a Christian school. That is how I sold my continuing education to my pastors. I took out hefty loans to finish off my degree and sure enough, retrospect on my senior year of high school became 20/20 and even though I was two decades late, scrambling to raise scholarship money finally made sense. Stephanie Mendoza - way to go, girl!
If you have sinned, slide forward.
I needed that Christian institution to feel safe to explore ideas I had not grown up with. Even in the context of Christianity, it was the most liberal place I had ever lived. Learning about what a World View was in my Core class blew my mind. I had no idea it was possible to see the world from different points of view. And still call yourself a God-fearing servant of the Lord. I am personally grateful to my Theatre and Gender Studies professor who gave me a space for my soul and mind to be liberated. The exposure to and freedom to test different ideas was the shot of pure exhilarating air that rescued my withering life. I was developing my own thoughts. My own way of seeing things. Constructive criticism in the university classroom asked us to justify our opinions, but this time, without judgment. Without right or wrong. It was shocking. A revelation far beyond any I’d ever had in church. No amount of being slain in the Spirit, prophecy, prayer, Bible study, youth meeting, or accountability circle had done for me what even my first year at university had. I felt cracked wide open to the conduit of light and stimulation that is learning and discovery. Being allowed to explore inside my soul and thoughts, no matter where that took me, and being encouraged to voice my own findings and opinions infused me with a euphoria that began my personal revolution. My pastor missed the point about education. It is not a piece of paper. Learning and expansion are a way of life. Knowledge really is power. I chose not to stay powerless.
